This web site is part personal
odyssey, part scholarly research and part visionary speculation. I have had the benefit of
many friends in cyberspace and elsewhere who have contributed mightily by providing
learned criticism, new information, editorial observations and shoulders to lean
on. Without their help, this site would not appear as it has, and may not have
been completed. They know who they are.

This
essay is designed to introduce this site, summarize its central thesis - the situation
humanity faces today, and how it got here - as well as summarizing solutions that
await use today. It also discusses the paradigms that
dominate our thinking in the West. It links to the site’s other essays,
which explore the topics in greater depth. I hope you find the reading experience
worthwhile.

This
Site's Thesis

Here is this site’s thesis,
stated as plainly and succinctly as I can.

In
the name of "progress," we are destroying our home planet. The United
States leads in destroying our environment and our fellow humans.

In the United States there is a strange
combination of denial and complacency regarding this situation.
While relatively few are conscious of it, we all (wittingly or unwittingly) participate
in it.

The twin ideologies
blinding United States citizens are nationalism
and capitalism, with a substrate of materialism. America’s current versions of
nationalism and capitalism are largely founded upon and sustained by myths, secrecy
and lies, and ultimately by massive violence.

People
adopt and irrationally defend these systems
of thought largely because they bring short-term material benefits, but the costs
are largely borne by the earth and the people who live in the "undeveloped" world (as well as this nation's poor).
The "undeveloped" world's poverty is directly related to having been
violently conquered by Europeans and being kept
in various forms of bondage ever since.

The
slavish devotion that Americans have for their ideological systems is more pronounced
in the educated classes, just as George Orwell wrote about in his prescient 1984. They seemingly think
they are the system's biggest winners, but in significant ways they are the most
enslaved. The most effective prison is one in which the prisoners do not realize
that they are in prison.

There
are deep spiritual dimensions to this situation. The
current paradigm is like a broken record played continually. The solution is
not to get a new record, but to stop playing old records to death. George Orwell called it the "gramophone mind."
It is time to put the records away.

We
will either wake up or destroy ourselves. Love is probably the only answer. Our tired
games can be easily given up, and we can readily heal the planet and ourselves.
The nuts-and-bolts of how to do it are already here.
Desiring to do it is the essential ingredient. Heaven on earth instead of hell
on earth is quite possible, and soon. We are facing a divine paradox: only by
caring for each other will we save ourselves. As Buckminster
Fuller observed, humanity is on the brink of Utopia or oblivion.

Right
or wrong, that is this site’s thesis. Criticisms of this site are dealt with
at this link.

How It Stands, and How We Got Here

Today, the human species stands poised on the brink
of two divergent near-term futures. Several trends may spell humanity’s doom.
One or all of them may become vehicles of our destruction, which may take most
of the planet’s ecosphere with it. Some can be immediately catastrophic, while
others are millennia-old trends that might have chaotic conflations, resulting
in or contributing to disasters of unprecedented magnitude for the human species.

First, here are looming catastrophes
that could spell immediate doom for billions of humans.

The current
“War on Terror” has hidden objectives (as with all
“wars”). Its long-term objectives are securing unfettered U.S. access to the
oil and gas resources of Central Asia and the
Middle East, and destroying anybody or anything that hampers that objective, as
well as further securing U.S. global hegemony.
Ironically, the industrialized nations do not even need fossil fuels, as
there are alternative and free energy solutions, but they have been actively
suppressed for generations. The War on Terror has destabilized Central Asia
and the Middle East, with Pakistan and India, two nuclear powers, rattling sabers
during 2002, and nuclear power Israel further enraging the Arab world by its unceasing
and escalating wars against the Palestinian people; a nuclear conflagration is
far more likely today than it was a year ago. Other weapons of mass destruction
may also make their appearance, from secret programs
that would curl most people’s hair to hear the smallest fraction of them; with America’s recent
invasion of Iraq, Armageddon might be just around the corner.

Earth’s human
population of more than six billion people is twice what it was in 1960, and three
times what it was in 1930. Earth is currently experiencing the greatest mass extinction episode since the dinosaurs’ demise, and this one is manmade.
In addition, the world is quickly hitting the wall of food production on several
fronts. The so-called Green Revolution may be nearing
its end, and billions of people may soon be at risk of starvation. If that happens,
it may well trigger a global food war.

Related
to the Green Revolution is the trend of mega-corporations trying to patent life
itself. Monsanto and other corporations are
genetically engineering plants to be dependent
on artificial fertilizers and pesticides and making crops whose seeds are sterile,
so farmers are forced to buy more seeds for the next season’s planting. A global food monopoly is taking shape; already,
two companies control about 80% of the global grain market, and Asia is quickly
becoming dependent on imported grain. The most
ominous aspect of that trend is genetic engineering. It is not confined to making
“Frankenfoods.” Perhaps the biggest risk is an inadvertent creation of a super-disease
that kills off most of humanity. Those fears are not outlandish. Even if a designer disease does not
get loose, humanity may be about due for a global epidemic of a magnitude not
seen since the 1340s.

Those
are three manmade catastrophes that loom today; the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse might be ready to ride. Another possible looming catastrophe is a
comet or asteroid hitting earth. That has become a popular speculation, as catastrophic theory has come back into vogue
during the past generation. During the past couple of years, astronomers and
NASA have made announcements that asteroids seemed to be on a collision course
with earth, and then recanted their findings, while “near misses” occurred that
were not even seen coming, where an asteroid came within a cosmic hair-width of
hitting earth. With NASA’s track record of obfuscation and cover-up, they probably would not
tell the public the true story anyway.

Humanity’s
“progress” has been damaging earth’s ecosphere for the past 10,000 years. According
to today’s anthropological findings, humans had a “great
leap forward” about 40,000 years ago as they improved their hunting and related
technologies and became super-predators. That initiated the golden age of the
hunter-gatherer phase of human existence. Humans were too successful, as they
hunted all the planet’s large, easily killed mammals
to extinction, a speculation supported by what happened when humans migrated to uninhabited islands during historical times.
When hunter-gathers exterminated their primary energy source, the Domestication Revolution began about 10,000
years ago in Malthusian fashion. All economic
systems ride atop ecological systems, and all ecological systems operate on the
principle of the acquisition, preservation and consumption of energy;
all political systems are about controlling economic systems or serving them.
When the Domestication Revolution began, earth’s ecosystems also began undergoing
dramatic change and destruction, and several man-made trends have reached ominous
levels today. Some are summarized below, with the energy issue figuring prominently.

The Domestication Revolution
led to “civilization.” Plants and animals were
domesticated, and humans were no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers. The alteration
of the earth’s ecology by exterminating all the big, easily killed animals was
minimal compared to what the Domestication Revolution did. Forests have created most of earth’s topsoil.
Because humans cannot digest cellulose, which comprises most of plant matter,
they domesticated and ate animals that could. They also razed forests
to use the wood for structure and fuel, and used the exposed soils for growing
plants that humans could digest. Deforestation, plow agriculture and irrigation
eventually destroy soils, through wind and rain loss, salination and mineral depletion.
Without forests to create new soils, that trend is a one-way ticket to desertification;
most of earth’s agricultural land has experienced serious soil loss and depletion,
and huge tracts of land have already turned to desert.

Earth’s
surface would average about 0° F if not for what are called “greenhouse
gases,” water vapor and carbon dioxide being the two main components, the lack
of which would have made life on earth’s surface a questionable possibility.
Between 10% and 25% of the warming currently attributed
to greenhouse gases is attributed to carbon dioxide (and it would be more pronounced
in colder climates, as carbon dioxide has a much lower boiling point than water,
but estimating that carbon dioxide makes earth about 10-15° F warmer
than it would otherwise be is probably not far from the mark, with all the uncertainly
of climate science). Burning fossil fuels has increased the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide content by a third during the Industrial Revolution. That dynamic is
undoubtedly contributing to today’s global warming,
which is rapidly melting the Northern Hemisphere’s glaciers, the arctic icepack,
and the Antarctic ice shelves are beginning to break up. I might see dramatic sea level rises
in my lifetime; the climactic changes from such rapid warming will be nothing
less than catastrophic for humanity, with record droughts, floods, crop failures
and other disasters. They are already happening. Among the “minor” effects of
such a change, it could kill the Gulf Stream, and
Western Europe will be about 20° F colder in the winter, while other
regions parch and bake. “Natural” catastrophes have been increasing at a rate
of 6% per year during the past generation. The long-prophesied earth changes
are already upon us.

Humanity
is quickly running out of oil and gas, but even if more oil and gas are discovered,
it is estimated that earth’s oceans have absorbed half of the carbon the Industrial
Revolution has vented to the atmosphere, and the oceans have
become more acidic, which threatens all ocean life, which is also where most
oxygen is generated. A cascading feedback effect could drastically affect the
ocean’s ability to absorb carbon and produce oxygen.

Related to the
chemicals issue are numerous toxic waste issues, such as pollution from chemical
farming and nuclear waste. The U.S. Department of Energy admitted to my face that
the “management” of nuclear waste is a racket, and none of the proposals put forth
to make it harmless will be pursued, unless it makes the waste management racketeers a pile of money. There
are more situations like that - where greed triumphs over issues of common sense and even survival
- than this or any other web site can possibly chronicle.

The
world’s most diverse ecosystems, the coral reefs, are in danger of becoming extinct
during the next century, as well as the most diverse land-based ecosystems, the
tropical rain forests. If that happens, humans may also face extinction.

Those
are simply some of the more prominent issues facing humanity today, and
their magnitudes are barely debatable, except for scientists and academics who
have sold their souls to the moneyed interests.
What is being done about this looming catastrophe, especially in the nation that
leads the parade to oblivion? Virtually nothing. Julian
Simon’s possibly fraudulent scholarship, or the opinions of about six scientists,
who are all in the oil industry’s hip pocket, are given a respectable hearing
in the corporate-owned mainstream media, as if their
interest-conflicted opinions matter as much as the scientific findings of the world’s most qualified climate
scientists. Earth is dying, and the rich and ruthless are raping and plundering
as never before, determined to wring every last cent out of earth and humanity…for
what? Noam Chomsky says that the West’s current
institutional ideology ranks hegemony above survival;
that is another way of saying those who run the show would rather rule in hell
(or even kill themselves off) than be regular members of heaven. Those who want
to rule in hell rather than be one of heaven’s regular members will get to live there, but they probably will not
be in charge.

Because
states in the West currently have limited ability to inflict violence onto their
domestic populations, they have developed the world’s most sophisticated and subtle
mind control systems, although much of the brainwashing has been accomplished
by the corporate order, not the government. Americans are consequently earth’s
most brainwashed people. One of America’s
finest teachers has stated for years that the American “educational” system’s
primary goal is turning Americans into stupid, childish, easily manipulated consumers.
It is not a new phenomenon, but a trend since the
nation’s founding. It accelerated when America’s robber barons began diversifying,
particularly John Rockefeller and Andrew
Carnegie. Rockefeller built the University of
Chicago, which dominates mainstream, largely capitalistic,
economic theory. Carnegie and Rockefeller’s “philanthropy” also took
over modern medicine early in the 20th century, and Americans have
been paying in awesome ways ever since.

That
is not to say that nobody cares, but not enough care enough, to counterweigh
those proudly on the dark spiritual path, and
the inertia of the masses that go whichever way the wind blows. I would love
to be wrong about this, but my experiences told me otherwise. My Pantheon of
modern-day saints is not large. Dennis Lee and
Mr. Professor are in it, along with some other free
energy comrades, but as a group, I have found more people of high integrity in
America’s radical left than anyplace else, populated by Edward
Herman, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Michael Parenti and others like them. Some overgrown
Boy Scouts, such as Ralph McGehee, discovered from the inside, the hard way,
about the dark reality of the system they worked for. About one in two thousand
American doctors possess the necessary integrity to declare that orthodox
cancer therapy is a racket, and dare to provide actual cures. In choosing
their cancer treatment, Americans are among earth’s least free people. Most of the high-integrity
saints in my Pantheon have come under intense attack from America’s establishment
defenders. America’s cultural managers do not want people waking up, and keeping
those of integrity from being heard, or vilifying them if they are, is one of
the mainstream media’s tasks, even to the extent of
wiping out their own publishing companies to prevent
the modern secular saints’ works from being published.

We
can have heaven on earth instead of hell on earth, but enough of us have to care
enough.

If one percent of the population
simply began waking up to possibilities of healing that most are completely (and
partly willfully) blind to, it might help catalyze enough awareness and action
to bring a healed humanity and planet into being. The two groups I have encountered
that are at the stage of their spiritual evolution
where they are closest to “getting it” are the radical
left and the mystical left. I have seen
more human caring and more ability to see the bigger picture in those groups than
any others. There may not be enough collective integrity in those groups to put
humanity over the top, but I know of no better candidates.

This
site was not designed to exclusively cater to those groups, but anybody who can
read English can probably get something from it. It is especially designed for
Americans because I am one, and there are many things we can begin doing today to assist a planetary
healing. I ask nothing of any reader except to honestly consider this site’s
thesis and information.

Who
is Paying the Price of our Progress?

A
Sampling of our System’s Losers,

And
What Can be Done About It

A
common response to this site, mainly by white men, is that life here (in the West,
the United States in particular) is good, so what am I complaining about? Life
is "good" for the winners, and white, educated American men are history’s
biggest winners. The point is not about how good the winners have it, but how
the losers are suffering. Below is a sampling of the losers that this
site’s critics usually ignore or minimize.

A
middle-aged Vietnamese man lost his parents and siblings in an American napalm
attack on their village in 1967. He was burned also, but survived. As Ralph
McGehee and others have made quite clear, the Vietnamese people’s
crime was wanting to be free of the white man’s yoke, and America killed off several
million Southeast Asians to keep them enslaved to the capitalistic order.

An elderly Japanese man lives in
Nagasaki today, and lived there as a child in 1945.
Although Japan had been trying to surrender for months, the U.S. stonewalled Japanese
surrender attempts so they could demonstrate their secret weapon, the
atom bomb. The 1945 bombings were vengeance on the Japanese for Pearl Harbor
and a demonstration of power to the Soviet Union. Although the justification
for the Hiroshima bomb was weak, and in light of current scholarship (Gar Alperovitz's,
among others), difficult to take seriously, Nagasaki was a great crime against
humanity. That elderly man lost his parents and entire family in the Nagasaki
bombing, a bombing that intentionally targeted a city, to demonstrate the bomb's
devastating impact. He still suffers from the wounds he received in the bombing,
including radiation poisoning. Ironically, the man was raised as a Christian,
and Nagasaki had Japan’s largest Christian community.
The United States has never apologized and still justifies
the bombings.

A
mother of five works in an American shoe factory today in Indonesia. The factory
was moved there in the 1990s, throwing thousands of Americans out of work. Indonesian
labor was cheaper, and the shoe company did not have to adhere to American standards
of worker safety and treatment. Wages were low largely because the United States
actively supported a military coup in Indonesia in 1965. When Suharto
came to power with U.S. help, the first thing he did was murder about a million
Indonesian citizens. They formed the political opposition to his dictatorial
rule, and mainly belonged to the Communist Party. The CIA drew up lists of people,
and the Indonesian army rounded them up and murdered them all. Thus, with the
Indonesian people put into virtual bondage, the "investors" from the
West flocked to Indonesia, moving factories there and drilling for oil, knowing
that their pawn would keep the masses in line. That woman's parents were murdered
in Suharto's political "cleansing" in 1965, and she was eventually reduced
to working in the new American shoe factory, making a few cents per hour. When
the workers in her factory recently went on strike because of their inhumane working
conditions, the shoe company asked the Indonesian government to send their brutal
soldiers to bludgeon those striking workers. Suharto
and his cronies stole about $60 billion from the Indonesian people, thereby
bankrupting the economy. The United States and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) rode to the rescue and "loaned" Indonesia about forty billion
dollars to stay solvent. Part of such a "rescue package" is the imposition
of "Structural Adjustment Programs" that essentially
cut out such "frills" as affordable food and heat for the Indonesian
masses, so they can pay back the "loan." The loan, like Suharto's looting,
never makes it into the hands of the citizenry. Starvation and other austerity
measures are imposed on them to pay off the "loan." The U.S. and IMF
have provided that kind of "help" to scores of Third
World nations, and they starve while they export food and other commodities
to the United States in order to earn "foreign exchange," to pay off
the loan. It is merely shell-game slavery, and America gets cheap imports out
of the deal.

A
thirty-year-old man picks bananas for United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the company
that brings us Chiquita bananas. His parents were murdered in the 1980s by the
Guatemalan government. The United States, at the behest of United Fruit Company
(and the Secretary of State and CIA director were investors), overthrew the democratically
elected government of Guatemala in 1954.[1] The president of Guatemala, Jacobo
Arbenz, was a fan of Franklin Roosevelt, and embarked on building a New Deal-style
economy, and providing everybody a minimum standard of living. United Fruit thought
that it owned Guatemala, and the American government conspired with United Fruit
to overthrow Arbenz in a coup. The American Secretary of State and his brother,
the CIA’s director, literally had a financial stake in
the coup. For about the next forty years, Guatemala
was ruled by a series of U.S.-backed dictators that eventually began slaughtering
the political opposition in their nation. The carnage became the worst in the
1980s, when the Guatemalan army murdered that banana picker’s parents as they
tried to organize the banana workers. That banana picker today cannot properly
feed his son, who at the age of four still cannot walk on his own, but American
consumers get cheap bananas.

An
Iraqi mother recently lost her teenage son,
as the trigger-happy American occupiers gunned him down as they “lit up” a street
where the boy was walking. A decade earlier, she lost her three-year-old daughter
to an intestinal ailment caused by contaminated water. The water was contaminated
because the United States specifically targeted the infrastructure of Iraq during
the so-called Gulf War, and then imposed an economic embargo that denied the Iraqi
people supplies such as chlorine to purify their water, because it could have
been "diverted" to military uses. Iraq used to have the best medical
care in the Middle East, but the United States reduced Iraq to Third World status
as we denied them food, medicine and other necessities. The woman’s husband was
conscripted into the Iraqi army during the 1980s and was killed by the United
States in the first Gulf War. Well more than one million Iraqi
citizens have prematurely died since 1991 because of U.S. actions that continue
to this day. Several hundred thousand of the dead are children under the age
of five. It is all part of a U.S. effort to control the region’s oil supplies
and bludgeon anybody who steps out of line.

Although
they cannot articulately tell us their suffering, all across America, pigs, cows
and chickens live hellish lives in factory farms in order to provide McDonald’s
and other firms the cheapest possible meat, milk and eggs. In addition, tens
of millions of animals in America die each year from experiments performed on
them. They die so that companies can test drugs, shampoo, and other consumer
products.

In
Bangladesh, a woman works in a clothing factory
for an American corporation, making pennies an hour, barely able to feed her family.
Where she works used to be called Bengal, which was perhaps the richest region
on earth when the British conquered it (which was why they set about conquering
it). Under the banner of the British East India Company the British raped Bengal,
just as the colonial masters raped the inhabitants of every colony they established.
Today, Bangladesh is one of earth’s most miserable places, a direct result of
centuries of British exploitation.

Today
in Chile, an American logging firm is clear-cutting the timber there, and the
logs are being shipped to a mill in Oregon for processing. America no longer
chops down its forests with its former abandon, but forests abroad are now being
decimated to supply America with wood.

A
Filipino man works as a cabin boy on a luxury cruise ship that sails across the
world's seas. He and his ancestors have lived under the white man's brutal rule
for nearly five hundred years. The Spanish first colonized the Philippines, then
the United States stole the islands in the Spanish-American
War, for the U.S.' first colony near Asia. Filipinos originally fought alongside
the United States against their hated Spanish oppressors, but after the revolution
ended it became obvious that the Americans had merely supplanted the Spanish as
the new imperial overlords. The Filipinos revolted, and the U.S. killed about
200,000 Filipinos to keep their new colony in shackles. It was not until World
War II that the Japanese overthrew the U.S. overlords, but the Japanese were just
as bad as the Americans and probably worse. After World War II, the Americans
reinstalled themselves as the imperial overlords and kept the Filipino people
in bondage. They set the stage for the fascist system that has existed there.
One side effect is women ending up being prostitutes for
American soldiers, and men end up working as cabin boys on cruise ships, rarely
seeing their families but sending money back home so their children can eat.
It is a miserable life, but Americans and other Westerners get cheap luxury cruises
and sex.

There
are more than two million Americans living behind bars
today. Most of them are not in there for what a rational person would call
a crime, but for "crimes" related to drug use. They are almost exclusively
America's poor, and doing drugs was an attempt to escape, however briefly, the
pain of their miserable lives. Ironically the CIA
is probably the world’s biggest drug runner, so it not only helps kill millions of foreign people, while making
millions more miserable, but it pays for their oppression by selling drugs to
America’s poor. The prison industry is booming in America, and instead of shipping
American jobs abroad, some American companies are closing down factories in the
free sector and rebuilding them in prisons, where the labor is cheap and in the
strongest sense, captive. Microsoft, run by some of the world's richest men,
has used that prison labor to keep its labor costs down, as have many other American
firms. This dynamic has created a powerful incentive to keep building prisons
(prisons are also becoming privatized) and filling them up with prisoners (disproportionably
people of color), ushering in a new era of slave labor.

A
few miles from where Bill Gates and Paul Allen live (with an aggregate net worth
of many billions of dollars), thousands of people are homeless and sleep on the
streets each night. Allen even bought an election in 1997 and ran an ad campaign
to convince the public to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a stadium they
did not need, so Allen could rake in more money. Where the stadium was built,
homeless people slept, so they had to find new alleys to sleep in (there are some
silver linings in this litany, one of which was Bill Gates donating $40 million
to help homeless women and children in July 2000, although charity is a poor substitute
for justice).

A black
man in Michigan today works the fry machine and cash register at McDonald’s,
making about eight dollars an hour. He used to work at an auto company, making
nearly twenty dollars an hour. His job was eliminated when it was shipped to
Mexico, where the auto company only has to pay two dollars an hour and does not
have to adhere to American safety and environmental laws.

A
Native American man lives on the Sioux reservation on Pine Ridge in the nation's poorest county. Deceptive
and dishonest treaties forced on his ancestors by the Americans stole their
lands, and many Native Americans were slaughtered outright.
To this day, the reservation natives live dire lives, with a life expectancy nearly
thirty years less than the average American's. The injustices continue, and the
policies against the natives are subtler than they used to be, but are still
exploitative.

In
the Pacific Northwest lives a man who lost his wife to cancer. In the early 1990s,
she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer and was given little chance of
survival. The couple heard about a clinic in Mexico that cured people of cancer
like hers. She went there and the treatment miraculously reversed
her cancer. During her treatment, armed bounty hunters for the U.S. Justice
Department kidnapped the man treating the woman's cancer, at gunpoint. They delivered
him to the United States, where the man spent years behind bars for the crime
of curing cancer. The man worked in Mexico precisely to stay out of an American
prison, and kidnapping him was a gross violation of international law, but that
is how American "justice" works. The woman
grappled with the bounty hunters as they kidnapped the man, and without his treatment,
she died. Her story is common in America, where all the cancer treatments that work have been outlawed,
and the ones that do not work (and even kill off the patients) are the only legal
"treatments," and make big money for the medical establishment. A half
million Americans die needlessly every year from cancer, while the medical establishment
rakes in the money. A similar situation exists with artery
diseases, which kills a million Americans a year.

That
is a sampling of our system’s losers. For the few winners in such a system, life
is good, as they enjoy cheap oil, land, bananas, software, running shoes, luxury
cruises, tin, sex, wood, cars, hamburgers and the like. Most of the system's
participants are losers, however, and not all that willing. The situations listed
above are only a sampling of the immense cost that humanity and the planet is
paying in order for those white, educated Americans to live the good life. The
United States is the world’s stingiest industrialized
nation.

Some problems are easily remedied. Some will take longer
to fix, but all can be readily resolved. Edmund Burke’s famous quote comes to
mind:

“The only
thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

It
is has been said in different ways over the centuries, but it is quite true.

True spirituality (one's relationship
with one's maker) has little to do with religion, and religion has often been
spirituality's greatest enemy. For people with love
in their hearts, and who act on it with minds engaged, they need not study any
teachings or join any religion or have the "right" beliefs. They will
never advocate violence, will be willing to see the deeper truth of matters, and
will play an important role in the upcoming healing of humanity and earth. According
to Neale Donald Walsch's god, humanity is a primitive
species that regards regression as progress (such as destroying the planet).
In societies of highly evolved beings, there are no
lawyers, accountants, soldiers, policemen, surgeons, etc. There are three basic
principles that they orient themselves around:

Humanity and the planet will not be healed by using
ideologies based on greed and fear (such as capitalism, or any ideology dogmatically
adhered to), through theft (such as starving out nations so we can steal their oil),
through exploitation (such as wage slavery and neocolonialism), through coercion (such
as prisons and punitive laws), or through violence
(police, armies, etc.). Love is the essential ingredient. With it comes truth
and joy.

There are those who believe that the
head needs to wake up first, and the heart will follow. Some are head people,
and some are heart people, and I think the head, heart and enlightenment issue
is like the chicken and egg conundrum. While I respect trying to get at the heart
through the head, I have also seen many stuck in their heads, unable to connect
with their hearts. Those with whole hearts have a kind of wisdom, and can see
things that others cannot. Jesus was perhaps the wisest person to ever walk the
earth, and it was his heart, not his head, that
led to his attainment. Nobody with a whole heart goes to “hell,” but many ingenious people, whose hearts
are dead, do. If people want to try waking up their minds first, and then their
hearts, they are welcome to try.

The thesis
and information on this site just might be wrong. Noam Chomsky said that in order
to truly learn, we must do the work. Nobody is going to open our skulls
and pour in knowledge and truth. When somebody says that they will, what is delivered
is often the opposite. It is up to each of us to find our own truths.

We
are all in this together, and we can make great progress in healing humanity and
the planet, if we care to.

Blinded
by the Paradigm

This
site is iconoclastic, and challenges the system and the beliefs of Americans in
particular. The same dynamics seemingly play out in all intellectual disciplines,
whether it is science, religion, politics, economics,
philosophy, etc. They all fall prey to dogmatism. The dogmas appear related.
Holding rigidly to a point of view, no matter what evidence flies in one's face
to contradict or temper it, is dogmatic. Dogma is based on denial, which is rooted in fear. It can
be called blind faith, or a faith that blinds, but it short-circuits the thinking
process.

In religion, the set of beliefs adhered
to can be called a faith. In science, it can be seen as a set of beliefs (theories)
called a paradigm. In politics and other disciplines, it can be called a worldview.
What it amounts to is how people view "reality." Do we each have our
own reality? Do we co-create it? How much does mine have to do with yours?
Those are timeless questions. Below are presented several examples of "paradigmatic
thinking." Paradigms always seem to be built from the bottom up. Children
are inculcated into the prevailing paradigms of the society they grow up in.

Scientific
Paradigms

The modern meaning of the
term paradigmwas coined by Thomas
Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A bedrock presumption
of the scientific worldview is that of objectivity. There is a world out there,
as related to our senses, and we can "objectively" observe what it is.
Some of the greatest physicists of all time have
challenged that notion. Is there really anything out there, and if
there is, is there an objective perspective of it? Science has no answers
to that question, but operates from that presumption. That presumption
can be right or wrong, but if I do not share that presumption, the direction that
science pursues may well be meaningless to me. That does not mean that I am right,
but I can hardly have a meaningful dialogue with a system of thought in which
we differ on our most basic premises. Lines of thought follow from their presumptions.

The most influential work of physics ever written was
Isaac Newton's Principia. In the beginning it makes three presumptions.
Two of those are the notion of time and space being absolute. For more than two
hundred years, Newton's Principia was the guiding light of physics. In
the 1880s two scientists, Michelson and Morley, performed the most delicate experiment
in history to that point and determined, much to their surprise, that the speed
of light did not vary, no matter the velocity of the light's source. A generation
later, Albert Einstein theorized that time and space were not absolute, but relative.
It appears that Einstein was right. His theories led to today’s physics, with
black holes, lasers, atomic bombs and a new paradigm from which to view the universe.
Its foundation was built on challenging the presumptions of the previous paradigm,
and challenging the presumptions is how paradigms and belief systems are changed.

People have tried minimizing the paradigm shattering
that Einstein did by saying that Newton's work was good enough, until our instruments
were able to prove his presumptions wrong. Wrong is wrong. Ptolemy's theory
that the earth was the center of universe also worked for its time, until it was
eventually proven wrong by scientific observation that led to new theories. Although
Ptolemy's astronomy "worked" for the day, it did not make it right.
Nearly identically, Newton's derivation of accurate calculation systems regarding
the effect of gravity did not make his presumptions about time and space right.
In addition, Newton did not even say what he thought gravity was, but merely described
its effect, an effect that relativity modified. Einstein will eventually be proven
wrong, and Einstein expected it. If Einstein had a professional descendent, it
may have been David Bohm, and Bohm’s theory of the implicate and explicate order
makes the seemingly dualistic nature of light - appearing as a particle and times
and a wave at others – partly an interaction with the observers’ point of view.
That can be seen as a direct challenge to objectivity, as well as bringing human
consciousness into physics.

Einstein said that
every theory is eventually killed by a fact. That did not make Newton any less
of a towering scientific figure, but his presumptions were eventually shown to
be incorrect, which radically altered today's physics.

James
Watt invented the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution. A
couple of generations later, Sadi Carnot created a theoretical framework for technology
that already existed. Victor Fischer challenged the foundation of thermodynamics,
stating that Carnot presumed an ideal gas as the working
fluid in his ideal engine. He then extrapolated from his logic with gas
engines to all working fluids. Wilhelm Reich and Eugene Mallove adduced experimental
data that directly challenged the Second Law
of Thermodynamics. Fischer and others maintain that Carnot's presumptions
and extrapolation were his crucial errors. Fischer maintains that beginning with
the steam engine and extrapolating that logic to all engines marched thermodynamics
off in the wrong direction, a misdirection from which it has not yet recovered.
Because of that faulty presumption (at least in the eyes of Fischer and others
whose scientific opinion I respect) regarding heat engines, the notion of liquid
heat engines has been ignored ever since. Fischer and others like him explain
that thermodynamics textbooks are gloriously wrong as they teach students about
thermodynamics, building on Carnot's presumptive foundation. The first prototype
of Fischer's engine came closer to Carnot's ideal efficiency than any other heat
engine ever had before. Among others, Tom Bearden
is challenging the theories of electricity at their root, once again questioning
the presumptions.

In the realm of microbiology,
the same phenomenon can be seen. Antoine Béchamp was one of the nineteenth century's
great scientific minds, and disproved the notion of the spontaneous generation
of life at the microscopic level with one of his Beacon Experiments in 1857.
Louis Pasteur was an opportunistic chemist
who quite possibly plagiarized Béchamp's work. Many years after he seemingly
stole credit for Béchamp's work, he still did not understand the process of fermentation
or why the spontaneous generation theory of life was inaccurate. Pasteur may
have marched microbiology off in the wrong direction more than one hundred years
ago.

Today’s microbiology textbooks present expedient fairy
tales regarding Pasteur’s disproval of spontaneous generation theory. At best,
the fairy tales are misleading, and at worst, it leads students gravely astray
in their first day of class, a misdirection they never recover from.

Royal
Rife, Gaston Naessens and others have
shown that pleomorphic theory is more persuasive in describing disease dynamics
than Pasteur's germ theory. The findings of the revolutionary microscopes of
Rife and Naessens not only support Béchamp's pleomorphic theories, but also overturn
today’s optical theories, which is also part of Newton's legacy. Einstein proposed
radical ideas of space, time and gravity, and the microscopes of Rife and Naessens
produced radical data about optics, enabling them to see life processes
never seen before. It does not mean that Newton's work was worthless, but it
was something that others improved on, which should be standard scientific practice.

Unlike the relatively gracious reception that Einstein's
theories received, the work of Rife and Naessens, the proof of which was evident
by looking through the lens of their microscopes, was met with jailing and other
vile behavior by the scientific and medical establishments. Why? In a pattern
that repeats throughout this web site, it appears to be because their work led
to cancer cures that were harmless, cheap and effective, and threatened
the cancer racket. Today's paradigm of "attack the tumor" is thorough
insanity, but it guides orthodox cancer therapy and research today, and Pasteur's
seeming plagiarism of Béchamp helped create the paradigm that serves up an attack-the-tumor
philosophy. This site’s medical essay presents more than twenty examples of how cancer cure pioneers
were wiped out in the West, mainly in the United States. The treatments were
mainly harmless, cheap and effective. Most medical professionals, especially
in the realm of cancer research and treatment, appear to have been blinded by
their paradigm.

Science goes far beyond optics
and microbiology. A math wizard I know told me that today’s geometry is merely
one of an infinite number of "valid" math systems, and with different
presumptions (such as Einstein's presumption that parallel lines meet at
infinity), each is "valid."

Today
the respected astronomer Halton Arp is questioning one of the foundations of astronomy
and cosmology: the universe is expanding from a primordial "Big Bang."
The universe may not be expanding at all. Naturally, his work is marginalized,
although he has not gone to jail. Theorizing whether the universe is expanding
or not generally will not land people in jail, because no economic empires are
built on it…yet. Einstein enjoyed that grace. The work of Nikola
Tesla, however, had a more practical impact on the lives of average people,
so he has been severely marginalized by history, although he invented the electricity
that powers our homes today, and was pursuing free energy before the robber baron
J.P. Morgan pulled the rug out from under him nearly a century ago.

Those
are issues in the "hard" sciences. The disciplines of optics, thermodynamics,
astronomy, microbiology, mathematics, etc., are all subject to radical revision.
Supposedly, those are no-nonsense studies, but their very foundations are being
seriously questioned today. What do we know? There has probably been
a major cover-up of extraterrestrial life by those who think
they run the world. I sought and watched a UFO myself in 2005. People I know and trust have
received secretive free energy and anti-gravity demonstrations,
whose revelations would wipe out many “laws” of physics today as well as radically
transform the world economy. Numerous areas of "hard science" are apparently
faulty in their theories and data, often because vested political and economic
interests actively thwart any progress. The paradigms are shaky at best.

Try engaging a scientist on these issues and watch
what happens. Only scientists as internally secure as Einstein can gleefully
admit that we barely know anything, or that they were taught lies (or "expedient
rubbish"). I have interacted with scientific giants, and they have all acknowledged
that we barely know anything. That is regarding "hard science." It
becomes more problematic regarding the "softer" issues such as history,
the media, politics, religion, economics, etc.

The
lies that American schoolchildren have been taught for centuries about Columbus
and his heroic feat is the very beginning of their American history studies.
In his important Lies my Teacher Told Me, James Loewen clearly demonstrated
how vapid American high school history textbooks are. Loewen observed that high
school children hate learning American history, partly because they know on some
level that they are being sold a lie. Loewen devotes a chapter of Lies my
Teacher Told Me to the Columbus Myth that children are taught. Virtually
no facts about Columbus and his voyages as taught to
American schoolchildren are undebatably true, except that he sailed in 1492 on
the Santa Maria.

Loewen,
a college history professor himself, made the case that college history, on the
other hand, is partly about disabusing those students of the fairy tales they
were raised with. I still have the history book I studied during my first year
in college.[3] Just
as high school history books do, the text began American history with the voyage
of Columbus.

After half a page of dubious information
on the natives who lived here for most of what we call history, and many
thousands of years before that, the authors quickly go across the Atlantic
Ocean and describe the European dynamics that led to the voyage of Columbus.
They briefly sketched Columbus' career as "discoverer" and concluded
that he "deserved the fame that ultimately came to him."[4]
The big news of Columbus' career was initiating the world's first and only complete extermination of millions of people,
the Taino of the Caribbean. Regarding that truly historic event there is barely
any mention, and it is only mentioned after the section regarding Columbus is
concluded. The text states,

"The
first experiments with forced labor, as in the island of Hispaniola, resulted
in the near extermination of the natives, but Indians continued to work in the
mines or on the ranches of the mainland for centuries…The whites exploited the
colored peoples, yet the Spanish conquerors were not particularly cruel and predatory,
no more so than the later English colonists. The millions of Indians who died
in Spanish America were mostly victims of the white man's diseases."[5]

My
college textbook was not exactly an exercise in iconoclasm. I am not the only
student who finished college thinking that Columbus was a hero. Howard
Zinn, with a Ph.D. in history, earned at Columbia, never
found out any differently about Columbus, until he began researching his A
People's History of the United States.

There
it is again; the paradigm’s foundation is formed with the subject’s introduction,
and the disinformation deludes students from that moment forward. As Loewen stated,
the purpose of the lies in history textbooks is partly
to inculcate a sense of nationalism in American children, to lead them to believe
their nation is a great one, forever unstained, marching off to endless feats
of "progress." It is a story of state as hero. As Loewen demonstrated,
the more "educated" Americans were, the more they supported the rape of Vietnam. In 1971, 80% of those with a
grade school education were against the war, 75% of those with high school education,
and only 60% of those with a college education.[6]

In
1925, the American Legion listed the ideal American history textbook's features:

"must
inspire the children with patriotism

"must
be careful to tell the truth optimistically

"must
dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success…"[7]

To
this day, that largely remains the philosophy of American history textbook publishers.
The "dumbing us down" thesis of John Taylor Gatto is elucidated by William Griffin
and John Marciano, who wrote:

"Textbooks
offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education. By hegemony we refer
specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue
of their control of the ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape
perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War…Within history texts, for example,
the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which
students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality
textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would
sharpen their critical abilities."[8]

"There
is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated
understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by
teachers." - Marc Ferro[9]

I
was raised in Ventura, California, a mission town founded by Junípero
Serra. The grade school I attended, down the street from where I grew up,
was named after Serra. I was taught three years of California history, and as
with Columbus and American history, Serra is the first significant figure of California
history (if the pirate Drake, who briefly visited
it, is not counted), while the many thousands of years of native habitation merit
a brief footnote.

As with the Columbus Myth, I
looked into the Serra Myth. Serra is up for sainthood today. It turns out that Junípero Serra was
a fanatical and masochistic priest who initiated the genocide
of California’s natives, another fact that escaped the history I was taught.
What was the difference between Serra, Columbus and Hitler? In the end, not a
great deal besides the level of technology available to them. Hitler was not
so much an aberration as the logical conclusion of the Western mentality.

That
kind of "teaching" creates a paradigm that guides thinking. In the
case of the history I was taught, the paradigm was that my ancestors were great
and noble heroes, "civilizing" the Western Hemisphere. Why? Apparently,
so I will believe I live in a great nation, forever progressing to new vistas
of wonder, leading the world to the light. It worked for a while. The paradigm
blinded me to reality and put me in a fantasy world. Why? Apparently, it was
to control me. With my brain carefully washed, I would gladly march off to distant
lands to annihilate the natives, to "defend" my great nation, or cheer
as others do so. I would believe in the insanity of attacking the tumor as
a way of "curing" cancer. That cancer
paradigm has created an awesome amount of suffering and death, while "coincidentally"
lining the pockets of the drug companies, doctors and others in the medical business.
The nationalism paradigm has created even more suffering and death, but generally for people of other nations, those we have
attacked with the world's biggest killing machine, while "coincidentally"
lining the pockets of military contractors and others.

In
religion the same paradigm manufacturing can be seen, also at square one. The
book of Genesis, in its first section, states:

“Then
God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every
creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God
blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth
and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of
the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”[10]

If
Genesis is to be believed, God put humans in charge of earth. Westerners generally
feel they have the right to treat animals and other "lesser" creatures
however they wish, which has led to the evils of factory farming and the animal experiments
of today. That is also why the English saw Native
Americans as subhuman. Europeans could be in charge of the natives, treating
them however we saw fit, annihilating them when they got in the way. Although
that first creation myth said nothing about the inferiority of women, a later
passage in Genesis, during the Garden of Eden tale, has God making the first woman
from Adam's rib. Then Eve ruined the paradise deal with the serpent and forbidden
fruit, with Adam blaming Eve for his sin, which has justified the
treatment of women as inferior creatures, a paradigm that continues to the
present day. Women did not get the right to vote in the United States, that revered
democratic nation, until less than one hundred years ago. Slaves and Jews got the right to vote in America before women did.
For a man, the paradigm as initiated by Genesis might sound like a good deal.
For women and animals (or "inferior" races), the deal was not so benevolent.

In economics, a paradigm built on presumptions
and myths prevails. The dogma of free markets dominates capitalistic
theory. There is no such thing as a free market or free trade. Free markets
are as plentiful as unicorns. With capitalism, the game is giving consumers the
right to buy whatever they want, but their menu must be limited to one or two
items. Americans can choose any cancer treatment they want, as long as it is surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.
Americans can get their energy any way they want, as
long as they pay the electric or oil companies for it. Americans can pay for
their goods any way they want, as long as it is in
U.S. dollars. Americans can get around any way they want, as long
as it is by car. In practice, alternatives can be chosen through great effort
and privation, such as going to Mexico for cancer treatment, if the U.S. medical
gangsters do not burn down the Mexican clinic or kidnap
its director. Generally, it is far too much trouble, if Americans are even
aware of the alternatives, so they shuffle along with the herd.

In
orthodox economic theory, there is the law of supply and demand, called a law,
as if it were gravity. The law of supply and demand is founded upon a presumption
of human greed. There exist other societies where greed
is not the "law." Donald Walsch's god said to him, when discussing
the highly evolved societies around the universe (humanity’s does not qualify
today):

"In those cultures it would
not be possible to fail to share. Nor would it be possible to think of 'charging'
increasingly exorbitant 'prices' the more rare a necessity became. Only extremely
primitive societies would do this. Only very primitive beings would see scarcity
of that which is commonly needed as an opportunity for greater profits. 'Supply
and demand' does not drive the HEB (Highly Evolved Being) system. That is part
of a system that humans claim contributes to their quality of life and to the
common good. Yet, from the vantage point of a highly evolved being, your system
violates the common good, for it does not allow that which is good to be
experienced in common.[11]

Greed
was nearly an unknown vice in the "primitive" civilizations of the New
World and Africa (the Aztecs being a rare exception), before
the white man came along.

Again, a paradigm
is built on a presumption, and a primitive one at that. How does one enforce
the paradigm? By attacking and marginalizing anybody not subscribing to it.
Hence, the U.S. war against "communism" and its anti-capitalistic heresies
of sharing. Ironically, Christians were the West’s first communists, going back
to its earliest days. The paradigm enforcers harass,
jail and murder doctors who cure cancer patients without attacking the tumor.
They throw free energy revolutionaries such as Dennis
Lee into prison on fabricated charges. They write Béchamp
and Tesla out of the history books. Halton
Arp and Noam Chomsky are unheard of by most Americans, but
Carl Sagan and Rush Limbaugh are household words.
The paradigm creators/enforcers parade Columbus, Serra, Washington, Jefferson,
Custer and the rest of that rogues' gallery as heroes that children are supposed
to look up to.

In the world of politics, similar
enforcement mechanisms are in place to keep the paradigm from being challenged.
Much of it is "innocent" in that once people get the paradigm drilled
into their heads, they are incapable of seeing beyond it. Ralph
McGehee discovered the hard way what his employer, the CIA, was really up
to.

Ralph had to run the gauntlet in order to tell the American people
what the CIA really did, and suffered greatly to live by his conscience. The
CIA has nothing to do with defending freedom, and never did. The CIA
has always been about keeping the subject nations enslaved to capitalism,
which is largely colonialism with new rhetoric. Ralph wrote about how the
CIA policymakers "culled" the data so it would conform to the prevailing
ideology. Thus, most Americans and nearly everybody at the CIA did not realize
that what happened in Vietnam and the whole Cold War were generally the U.S.'
efforts to keep the people of the post-colonial
world enslaved to the West. The realization that the "communist menace"
was only the attempt of the populations in Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia,
etc., to free themselves from the white man's domination was fleetingly acknowledged
by barely anybody in America, and America’s mainstream media and its pundits have
never admitted it. In 2000, Ralph wrote,

"As I discovered in my 'Vietnam days' policy
dictated intelligence with William Colby and others ensuring that no information
challenging our policy saw the light of day. However, the rejection of reality
started from the very first days from just after WWII and prior to the creation
of the CIA.

"Later even Sam Adams, the number
one analyst/protestor on Vietnam, had little knowledge about the Communists "People's
War," written about ad naseum by Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh and even Mao
Tse-Tung.

"Agency analysts do not use open
source data/datum - and herewith lies one major cause of its egregiously terrible
intelligence. Another is the multi-leveled bureaucratic structure of the CIA
that authorizes politicized bureaucrats at all levels to hack away at raw intelligence
until it supports policy.

"In my last few
years in the CIA as a skeptic I saw that distorting intelligence to support policy
was a universal truism. This can be deduced particularly from Mel Goodwin's experience
regarding CIA intelligence on the Soviet Union. William Casey was a total practitioner
of this phenomenon.

"…For a successful career
in the CIA one must accept that the Emperor wears gorgeous robes - stating the
obvious kills the messenger."

Of
the major ex-CIA authors who are critical of the Agency, four men make up nearly
all of them: McGehee, Phil Agee, John Stockwell and Victor Marchetti. They all
either endured huge legal battles to publish what they did, or endured many illegal
intimidations. Agee essentially lost his citizenship for publishing Inside
the Company, and lived under political asylum in Germany, after being hounded
across Europe. The CIA tried cloak-and-dagger strategies to prevent him from
publishing his book, bugging his typewriter to find his Paris hideout while he
wrote his memoirs and trying to lure him to Spain to possibly murder him. Marchetti
and McGehee engaged in huge legal battles with the CIA, as they tried publishing
their books "legally." Stockwell was like Agee in that he did not let
the CIA censor his book before publication, and had a running legal battle with
them after he published his In Search of Enemies. Other ex-CIA authors
write under pseudonyms to avoid those fates. Wiping out the messenger is how
the false paradigm can be sustained.

In their
masterful Manufacturing Consent, Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky clearly demonstrate the complete subservience of the media
to government/corporate policy during the Vietnam days, during the bludgeoning
of Central America in the 1980s and so on. The true motivation of our aggression
in Southeast Asia was never hinted at. The media completely inverted reality,
so the people we invaded and murdered by the millions were the aggressors, while
our invading army was doing all the suffering. It would be as if the Nazi invasion
of Poland were depicted as a Polish aggression against Germany. That inversion of reality over Vietnam lasts to this
day in the U.S. mainstream media. Orwell
would have been impressed.

What Manufacturing
Consent and other works clearly demonstrate is a total adherence to a paradigm
(e.g., we are the good guys) that no amount of contradictory data is ever able
to shake, no matter how bald and undeniable. No matter how many obvious lies
America’s politicians told, no matter how many dishonorable actions by its diplomats,
the corporate media could be counted on to put the best possible spin on it, somehow
transforming genocide into a noble affair. Somehow, the United
States killed several million people and destroyed the lives of many millions
more in Southeast Asia, but our motives were pure, through and through. The media
as propagandists reached new heights during the invasion
and occupation of Iraq.

The American people
themselves do not buy the Vietnam propaganda (most saw the war as immoral on America’s
part), but the media and other establishment mouthpieces have never admitted it,
and it looks like they never will. They repeat the dogma that America’s motivation
was pure, but the strategy unfortunate or "unwinnable." Although most
Americans believe our motivation regarding Vietnam was tainted and immoral, that
notion has never entered the pages of the mainstream media. As astute
scholars have stated, the notion is simply "unthinkable"
by mainstream media personnel.

Fluoride
was magically transformed from a deadly industrial waste into a tooth's best friend.
Most fluoridation pioneers had conflicts of interest or directly worked for fluoride
polluters, as Harold Hodge did, although the nature of his employment
by the fluoride-polluting military was kept secret. Industry-employed scientists
fabricated and distorted data to make an industrial waste appear a safe cavity
preventive, although there is no credible evidence that supports that notion,
and all evidence shows that fluoride is a deadly poison that actually destroys
the teeth and damages brains, among other health disasters.

The
system can be sophisticated and subtle. It is not always easy to see through
the many layers of deception. The reason all those false paradigms are held in
place is because they provide comforting fictions for many people, and great wealth
and power for a select few. If, like Nazi Germany and probably every other nation,
Americans can see themselves as forever noble, virtuous and heroic, as a presumption,
they can inflict their violence at will on anybody else with a clear conscience.
In that regard, the American history brainwashing, the CIA's lies, the media
inversions of reality and so on form an interlock of self-interest. For those
at the top of that food chain, life is "good." In addition, Americans
get cheap bananas, oil, tin and other imports due to America's enforcement of
the international neocolonial order. White, educated
American men are history’s most privileged demographic group, and eagerly believe
the lies because it justifies their privileged position. Virtually without exception,
they are the people who most take my work to task. As the Ralph
McGehees, Rodney Stiches and Dennis
Lees of the world have discovered at great personal cost, the enforcers of
those murderous paradigms do not deal gently with their heretics, and for the
nearly 99% of humanity who are the losers in such a system, life is not pretty.

Not
all paradigms blind their adherents. The problem is adhering rigidly to any
paradigm and suspending our mental and emotional faculties. Many paradigms can
illuminate, but in a world where power and greed rule, the healthy
paradigms are still waiting to be adopted. It is not yet too late, if enough
people begin waking up and caring.

Forgetting
the Basics, and Turning Vices into Virtues

Intimately
related to the issue of founding paradigms on false assumptions is a phenomenon
where people conveniently forget the lessons taught them as small children, thinking
they have become too grown-up and smart for that. People often recall the self-serving
assumptions, while forgetting the other-serving admonitions. That part of growing
up is not exactly a triumph. One of the greatest American spiritual masterpieces
to make it into mainstream awareness in my lifetime is Robert Fulghum's All
I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. For literate Americans,
it has been virtually impossible to avoid seeing the list he developed. Fulghum
made the case that all the truly important things worth knowing were taught to
us by age five. The first seven items on his list were about being a “good citizen”
and being considerate when interacting with others. I will present his first
seven rules, and how the West, and the United States in particular, has learned
those lessons.

Share. Europe’s
conquest of the world is history’s greatest act of genocide and theft. Its
effects over the centuries have resulted in the situation where the earth’s richest
one thousand people have more wealth than the poorest three billion, for a wealth
ratio of millions-to-one. The U.S.-inflicted genocide in Iraq today has everything
to do with controlling the Middle East’s oil supplies, and the current “War
on Terror” is more of the same. The United States has been stealing Iraq’s oil, while millions of Iraqi citizens die. Today, the
United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but consumes a
quarter of its energy, and the West consumes the vast majority of the world’s
resources, while the people in the subject nations live lives of dire poverty
and oppression. Because of neocolonial
institutions such as the World Bank and International
Monetary fund, nearly all the world’s poorest nations export food to the United
States, as they earn “foreign exchange” to pay off “loans” that those nations’
people never received any benefit from. It is merely a new form of slavery.
In the United States, the richest 1% owns more than the poorest 95%, and in 2000,
the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, had more wealth than the poorest 100 million
Americans combined. These situations are not laws of nature, but due to several hundred years of exploitation of the world
by white people, with the current incarnation of the rapacious system called “global
capitalism.”

Play Fair. The West
has never come close to playing fair with those it exploited and murdered. From
the very beginning of the world’s conquest, Spanish legal tactics were used as
a form of fraud to steal land from the natives,
as well as enslaving them. Priests, soldiers and lawyers formed the vanguard
of the enslavement of Mesoamerica’s natives. The natives of the Caribbean were
completely exterminated during the early days
of conquest, so today’s Mexico is the first place that the Spanish truly “colonized”
(if their rape of the Canary Islands is not counted). That colonization
was anything but fair. When the other colonial powers got into the game, the
same patterns were repeated. Christopher Columbus
and George Washington were anything but heroes,
yet they have national holidays in their name. Washington first proposed the
strategy of stealing native land by forcing treaties
on the Native American tribes that the United States would never honor, a
strategy that was immediately adopted by the Continental Congress, and of more
than 370 treaties forced on the native American tribes by the United States government,
historians cannot find even one that the United States honored. That legalistic
fraud is not merely something in America’s history that has been covered up.
In today’s international arena, the United States is the
world’s most lawless nation. As Noam Chomsky says, the United States’ disregard
for the restraints of international law is the worst the world has seen since
the days of Nazi Germany.[12]
The blatant vote fraud (and subsequent Supreme
Court fraud) that took place in Florida during the 2000 U.S. presidential election
is one more example of how America “plays fair.” During the 1990s the United
States began kidnapping people from Mexico to
bring them to America for “justice.” Although it was a violation of international
law that not even Hitler could get away with, the Supreme Court chief justice,
the noted racist William Renquist, ruled that kidnapping people from Mexico was
OK because the extradition treaty with Mexico did not explicitly say “no kidnapping
allowed.”[13] I
had brutal experience regarding how our legal system
plays fair when I tried to help bring alternative energy to the marketplace.

Don’t Hit. Internationally, the United States
is history’s most violent nation. Nobody comes close. The genocide of Native Americans during the nineteenth
century was a mere warm-up to the violence that the United States has inflicted
on humanity during the past fifty years. Usually, the United States merely finances
and arms its pawns, as with Indonesia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Central
American banana republics and elsewhere. That record would be bad enough,
and by itself is one of history’s bloodiest records.[14]
Using its armed forces, the United States has also killed
several million people directly during the past fifty years, in Southeast
Asia, Korea, Iraq, Panama
and elsewhere. More people have died as a direct result of the United States’
efforts in Southeast Asia and Iraq than died in Hitler’s death camps, but somehow,
America is the good guy, defending the high principles of freedom. Rhetoric and
reality regarding that situation are on nearly opposite ends of the spectrum,
and the most fervent believers of the propaganda
are educated Americans.

Put Things Back
Where You Found Them. This rule is related to not taking things that belong
to others and cleaning up after ourselves. It relates directly to the “play fair”
observations above and the “clean up your mess” rule, dealt with below.

Clean up Your Mess. The United
States is the world leader in creating environmental devastation. From fossil-fuel
emissions to the environmental devastation of its subject nations, the United
States (and the West in general) has created the greatest environmental devastation
the world has known. As the environmental movement in the United States gained
momentum during my lifetime, environmentally-disastrous activities such as mining,
oil exploration and pumping, deforestation and the like have been exported to
subject nations. America has also dumped its toxic waste onto subject nations.
In America, waste has always been dumped in the poorest areas, including the land
the remnants of Native American tribes live on. For a clear illustration of that
principle in practice, a memorandum from the World’s Bank’s chief economist was
leaked to the public during the early 1990s. In his memo, the chief economist,
Lawrence Summers, encouraged the bank to promote
the migration of the “dirty industries” to the less developed nations. What kind
of public disgrace and career scuttling did Summers experience when that memo
became public? In 1999, Bill Clinton promoted him to be the U.S. Secretary of
the Treasury.

Don’t Take Things That Aren’t
Yours. All imperial cultures have been master thieves, and the United States
is no different. From stealing the native land, using George Washington’s criminal
strategy, to stealing Iraq’s oil with the oil-for-food
swindle, the United States has always been a kleptocracy, and is now playing
the game on a global scale.

Say
You Are Sorry When You Hurt Somebody. After America
shot down a passenger plane taking off from Iran, killing hundreds of people,
U.S. Vice President George Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States
of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”[15]
That is not an aberration, but standard United States foreign policy. Not long
ago, lame duck Bill Clinton made a public relations trip to Vietnam. The United
States indefensibly murdered millions of Vietnamese citizens during
the 1960s and 1970s, while trying to recolonize the region, even though the Vietnamese
people, led by Ho Chi Minh, were instrumental in thwarting Japan’s imperial ambition
in the area during World War II, and were considered U.S. allies. While Clinton
expressed a willingness to let the past be the past, and to move forward in bettering
U.S.-Vietnamese relations, when asked if he would apologize for what the United
States did to Vietnam, he declined to do so.

Those
Seven Noble Rules. Regarding those seven noble rules, the United States regularly
ignores them, usually conjuring impressive-sounding rhetoric to justify its behavior,
and most Americans either cheer those actions or quietly acquiesce to them. Why
is humanity heading toward that brick wall? Because people reject rules of consideration
for others that they were taught as young children, thinking they no longer apply,
or lying to themselves that what is so obvious is not really happening. People
are either mindless, or are knowingly doing these
things. I think it is a little bit of both, which all begins with a hard
heart, which is because people are afraid. It does not have to be this way.

Turning
Vices Into Virtues. Long before Robert Fulghum walked the earth, the West
has been familiar with the seven deadly sins. They are: pride, greed, anger,
envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. Americans have enshrined some of those deadly
sins as not only benign, but worthy attributes of our societies, even making them
the centerpieces of our ideologies. It is exactly the kind of inversion of reality
that George Orwell wrote about, where freedom
is slavery, war is peace, and ignorance is strength.[16]
When 1984 rolled around, I read discussions of why Orwell’s dark vision did not
come to pass. It largely has. Here is how Americans have been turning deadly
sins into either virtues or valuable attributes of our ideologies, or rendering
them benign or invisible.

Pride.
Nationalism is all about generating feelings of national
pride. Most of what I was taught regarding generating feelings of
national pride was a pack of lies. As we inflict endless
violence and suffering onto the world’s people, we do it with great
national pride, which is partly how we are blinded to the true nature of what
we support. That dynamic was never more apparent than the flag-waving
aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001. Since September
2001 I have regularly sat in traffic behind cars that wear bumper stickers with
a picture of the American flag and the words “Proud to be an American” or “The
Power of Pride.”

Greed.
America’s capitalist ideology has made greed a centerpiece of its theoretical
framework. The so-called law of supply and demand assumes greed. The
“law” states that people will raise the price of something if it becomes scarce
or demand increases, as they seek profits at the expense of others. As Neale
Walsch’s god remarked in Conversations with God, it is a “law” that only
applies to “primitive” societies, and the mark of a primitive society is that
it regards regression as progress, and inverts reality. In Oliver Stone’s Wall
Street, the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas told an audience that
“greed” makes our system work. Stone was being ironic, but I have heard such
sentiments coming from the mouths of today’s educated Americans. Douglas has
even become a hero in Wall Street circles, because of his character’s “greed is
good” sentiments.[17] In the minds found on Wall Street, greed is good,
as it makes our system work. Instead of wondering about a system that runs on
greed, or perhaps greed being something to try to reduce, it is cheered as a beneficial
aspect of our system, the very engine that drives it. That same mentality has
been adopted in corporate ideology, where continually-increasing profits is the only reason for
a corporation’s existence. The complementing aspect of capitalistic theory
is the “invisible hand of competition.” That “invisible hand” is the fear that
your competitor will erode your profits or put you out of business. In such theorizing,
fear of the competition is what kept people honest. It makes fear a vital component
of how our system works. Instead of working to reduce such dynamics in our society,
it is worshipped as a centerpiece of our ideology, a vital piece of our system.
Wiping out the competition is the essence of capitalism, which I discovered the
hard way during my days with Dennis, which even
Smith remarked upon in his work. Capitalistic
ideology is based on greed and fear.

Anger.
American men, especially older than sixty-five, are emotional cripples, and anger
is about the only emotion acceptable for them to openly display. American men
are getting a little better in that department, but anger has too often been enshrined
as a virtue. For many years, I have read and heard Christians (and even supposedly
enlightened mystics) laud Jesus’ moment of anger in the temple, whipping the moneychangers
out of the temple. What those people always ignored was that his moment of violent
anger (the only one we see in the New Testament) led directly to his death, as
the high priest Caiaphas, who was getting rich from the temple coffers, led the
effort to put Jesus to death, sparked by his performance in the temple, which
impacted the temple’s cash flow. Yet, so many people point to what was likely
the lowest moment of Jesus’ life as his greatest triumph. People have justified
bombing Yugoslavia to me with Jesus’ moment of anger.
Jesus’ temple tantrum more likely showed that even a Christ can have his bad days,
while it has been used by Christians countless times to justify
violence. Christians are by far the most violent people of all time.

Envy. At this stage in America’s journey, it
does not envy anybody else much of anything, except perhaps Middle East oil.
What it wanted, it took long ago. America is the king
of the global hill. The people who run America knew that a long time ago.
Before World War II ended, the American government knew it would emerge with unprecedented
global power. Declassified documents display the mindset of those who ran the
American government back then. It was all about hoarding the world’s wealth and keeping the world enslaved
to U.S. capitalism. George Kennan even used the word “envy” when describing
how other peoples might look at the U.S.’ unprecedented wealth, and he suggested
abandoning all pretence of pursuing “unreal objectives such as human rights, the
raising of living standards, and democratization”, and begin dealing in “straight
power concepts” to keep the world under the U.S.’ boot, and Kennan was a foreign
policy dove. The hawks had even more ruthless plans.
U.S. foreign policy is merely a modern variation of a very old dynamic. Also,
there is a lie in that logic. Much of the so-called “envy” of the world’s poor
was not envy, per se, but the desire to be free from the West’s shackles, so they
can eat the food they grow, etc.

Lust.
Among my psychologist friends, sexual abuse is the childhood abuse they see almost
more than any other, at least for ones that can leave debilitating effects for
the rest of the patient’s life. The porn industry was the first one on the Internet
to make money. On television, Americans are flooded with titillating ads and
shows with endless sexual double-entendres. Even Shakespeare played to that passion
in his plays. It is also part of what I call the “War
Against Women.”

Gluttony
and Sloth. These are related vices; with gorging one’s self complementing
laziness. Americans are history’s fattest and most sedentary people. In 2003,
65% of American adults were overweight. This is partly due to the high calorie,
high fat, high sugar, high protein, junk food diet that Americans eat. It is
also due to the cars, garage-door openers and other conveniences that Americans
are history’s fattest people. Since 1980, the percentage of American adults considered
“obese” has climbed from 15% to 30%. Americans are particularly gluttonous when
the starvation happening across the world is taken into consideration. In the
West, about half of all adults are overweight. In India and elsewhere in the
Third World, most adults are underweight. What the West is doing is called “overconsumption”
in academia’s parlance. It used to be called gluttony. The world’s overweight
and hungry people are of approximately equal number: more than a billion of each.[18]
American gluttony and sloth is the greatest the world has ever known. Not to
say that Americans consider that distinction a great virtue, and pathological
reactions to that situation, such as anorexia, are understandable. In general
however, most Americans do not think much about it, and the media bombards viewers
with all manner of food ads, and most of that advertised “food” should not be
touched with a ten-foot pole. The day I originally wrote this, my wife handed
me the Sunday newspaper, where an article discussed the abysmal American diet,
and how it directly leads to heart attacks and other degenerative diseases. It
is worse in the “beef belt” of America’s Midwest, where coronary surgeons have
a booming business. Even as undeniable as the evidence is, most of the afflicted
people, filling their plates with greasy food, do not really care. In the words
of one customer at a Kansas City barbecue establishment, “We’ve grown up on meat
and potatoes. There was always a meat and starch at every meal, and it just carries
on to how we eat today.” That customer drove 200 miles to eat that meal.[19]
I was recently in Hawaii, where gluttony is a virtue, with billboards advertising
all-you-can-eat establishments with smiling local residents who have eaten themselves
into gargantuan size. They are local heroes. My brother worked in Hawaiian hospitals
where he regularly treated those trenchermen and trencherwomen, where they ended
up after having heart attacks and other health failures, for those who survived
long enough to get to a hospital.

Forgetting
the basics because we think we are too smart for those old lessons, or inverting
reality by turning vices into virtues, is an integral aspect of why humanity stands
on the abyss’ edge today. It can be different.

Footnotes

[1] See Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s Bitter
Fruit; The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.

[17] In the April 2004 edition of Premiere Magazine,
p. 68, Michael Douglas talks about the Gordon Gecko character that he played in
Wall Street, and says that nearly twenty years after he played that role,
he regularly experiences “half-drunk Wall Street investment bankers coming up
to me and saying, ‘Hey, man, you were the guy, greed is good.’ They look at me
like I am a folk hero, but I was supposed to be a bad guy. It’s a very sad comment.”

[18] See Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil’s “Nourishing
the Underfed and Overfed,” in The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World,
2000, pp. 59-78.

[19] See Stephanie Simon’s “Straight to the Heart,” The
Seattle Times, p. A3, May 27, 2001.